Roman Berry will be bringing his solo performance work Not Very Berry to Waterside for Adhocracy 2023. We caught up with him to discuss memories, creativity, and much more.

Firstly, tell us about Not Very Berry – what’s the core concept of the project and how did you conceive it?

The idea for Not Very Berry was conceived as a response to have more diverse narratives, that platforms the intersection of culture, identity, and personal growth. The concept emerged from the desire to shed light on my personal challenges, my journey of self-discovery, growing up and living in Australia, especially coming out as a Filipino gay man, in Adelaide. I got very excited when the expression of interest from Vitalstatistix on Adhocracy was posted, as I have been sitting on this idea since the middle of the pandemic, and this initiative prompted me to take action.

Part of the process will be retracing personal odyssey, capturing struggle and triumphs, walking down memory lane through images, and focusing on pivotal moments, to ignite a spark towards a narrative, structure, and form towards my first ever solo ‘hybrid’ performance.

This project very specifically utilises a Filipino folk dance called ‘Tinikling’ as part of its process. What led to your fascination with this practice, and how have you adapted it for the work?

I’m fascinated of the rhythmic and vibrant movements of TINIKLING. This is a traditional Filipino folk dance, that uses two bamboo poles tapping and beating on the ground, with dancers stepping in, hopping, jumping and turning in between them, as they dance gracefully. It requires enormous concentration to do the movement. These movements are integral to the development of Not Very Berry. I’m utilising them as tools, powerful metaphors, symbolising the challenges of life, weaving through complexities of identity, acceptance, and cultural integration. Through this lens, Tinikling dance becomes an important backdrop to the story of self-discovery, steering a fusion of cultures, while finding oneself amidst the diaspora.

You refer to the work as ‘semi-autobiographical’. What is the intersection between fiction and biography here?

I’ve coined it ‘semi-autobiographical’ because, in a way, Not Very Berry is a work that is inspired by real-life experiences. Part of the challenge of the development is to find ways to introduce and merge fictional elements. The intersection between fiction and biography lies in the fact that, while the core themes, emotions, and some events in the story might draw from my own life and experiences, there’s also room for creative imagination and narrative exploration. And that’s why I’m so thankful for programs like Vitalstatistix’s Adhocracy, because it champions creatives, theatre makers and artists to experiment, to make mistakes, to test and collaborate. The semi-autobiographical approach of the work helps me to navigate the delicate balance between personal authenticity and creative storytelling. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction and letting the creative process to grow.

Where does Not Very Berry go after Adhocracy?

Having had a few days of researching, collecting images, anecdotes from friends and family, I am hoping to get Not Very Berry developed further by engaging the Filipino Australian community more. From the process so far, I have had a lot of further provocation to explore within the context of balancing cultural stigmas and biases, of being part of the LGBTQI family, within the Filipino Australian community. Hoping to also have other creatives and collaborators to further craft a narrative, structure and form, as mentioned earlier, towards the first ever solo ‘hybrid’ performance. Hoping to then take to festivals, independent theatres ands regional theatres.

Anything else audiences should know?

In the intimate presentation and sharing of my discoveries and findings from the development, I would really appreciate people’s feedback on the process. There will also be a chance to participate and try the Tinikling Dance.

Find out more about Not Very Berry at the Adhocracy Website.

Before Solomon Frank appears at Adhocracy 2023 to expand our definitions of musical genre, we sat down to talk all things The MacroPlastic Workout.

First of all, tell us about The MacroPlastic Workout – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

We’ve been inspired by the horror and farce of the everyday, entanglements between human and more-than-human. A hermit crab using a plastic doll head as a shell, drifting marine plastics as new ecological habitats for microbial communities, newly discovered bacteria that can digest plastic, microplastics as an unavoidable component of 21st century human diets; how can we see ourselves as integrated into this new petrochemical plastic ecology and more specifically, how will we maintain ‘good health’ and ‘wellbeing’ in bodies and worlds riddled with invasive plastic? We also have various references from across nature and culture: sage grouse males’ inflatable chest sacs, frigate birds’ bright red balloon sacs underneath their beaks, Jacques Tati, John Cage on 1950s TV and cormorants. We also have a shared love of workout videos that developed when we were living together in Sydney lockdown. Having Chris Hemsworth lead us through “feel the fire lower body crunch” and that structure of repeated obtuse and difficult actions has heavily informed the structure of the show.

This piece utilises ‘inflatable-percussive-wearable musical instruments’, which is a wonderful phrase. How did you come to this particular mode of constructable instrumentation? 

The time at Adhocracy will be spent figuring out this exact question. We have Rachael Guinness on board to design prototype these costumes that integrate into the installation of balloons and tubes we’ve created.

You’ve stated an intent to create ‘aesthetic and genre dissonance’ in this piece. How are you hoping that this will manifest?

Drawing on expanded forms of clarinet and percussion practice, we’ve established an elaborate plastic gymnasium activated using sound and movement. Our muses are cheap mass-produced plastic clarinets and percussion instruments, household objects recontextualised as instruments (tubes, balloons, latex condoms and nylon). We are experimenting with a refined junk aesthetic to create electroacoustic audio components that integrate into our acoustic practice and allow for compelling new forms of genre dissonance. For example, diegetic sound art suddenly transforms into campy gay pop and pounding techno.

Anything else audiences should know?

The show straddles the fine line between sacred and silly. You might laugh or you might cry.

Find out more about The MacroPlastic Workout at the Adhocracy Website.

Ahead of her appearance at Adhocracy 2023, Isobel Marmion dropped past to have quiet conversations about her project Streetlights and Long Nights.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renowned annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 1-3. Full details, including program, HERE.

Firstly, tell us about Streetlights and Long Nights – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

Daley Rangi stopped by to wax poetic with us on all things I Don’t Owe You. This is the resultant dialogue.

 Firstly, tell us about ‘I Don’t Owe You’ – what’s the project all about and what inspired it?

To preface, I struggle to talk about my work, so please take the following with a grain of salt, or your preferred mineral compound. This work feels like just one of many access points to a vital, ongoing conversation about bodily integrity. Everything I explore has been explored before, by many ancestors and kin. But while it still needs to be said, I’ll say it. Nothing inspires this bodywork better than being harassed, threatened, and attacked for having facial hair whilst dressing or appearing otherwise ‘feminine’, breeding a discomforting feeling of owing, of debt, of extraction.

Perhaps the work may act as a gentle reminder that gender is still an endless game of survival for many, an intangible paradox of joy and rage, violence and freedom. Perhaps the work is about the semiotics and rituals of gender, and perhaps the signed systems and labour that comes with it. Perhaps it turns the lens of ‘gender’ away from the colonial, in search of something more beautiful, more human, more ancient. Perhaps, despite the violent overtones, it’s a work about care, connection, and community. I’m not interested in hyper-individualism. That’s not the answer.

The piece is described as being ‘endurance-based’ – what does this mean for an audience, and how does it evoke the overarching themes?

To be utterly transparent, I’m still working that out. I feel a sense of endurance just existing, many days of the week, as do many of my kin, as do many humans, probably. I think endurance works, which most often involve the body, are, or should be, less about the ‘shock’ factor of what the artist might be doing, and more about the chance to slow down and examine ourselves and each other, maybe change or adapt our collective behaviours towards the kind. We each have a body we can share, or show, or use to shock, I’m more interested in what lies beneath the skin.

Humans are instinctively born to engage with other beings, I suppose I’m just providing a framework for some deeper engagement. An ideas trampoline, impossible futures made possible by action. Sure, yeah, I wanna push people off a fence. Choose a side, either side, but just feel something, do something, anything. It’s less about making audiences uncomfortable, but rather about using my own body and stories and battles as the archaeological site to dig up some truths that relate to everybody.

As this is a long form piece, what will you be presenting at Adhocracy, and how will it differ from the final form?

It definitely won’t be anything extended at Adhocracy, rather a testing ground, an experiment. After reading this, grab a writing tool, and throw down a few sentences starting with ‘I don’t owe you…’. The ‘you’ can be whoever you want, maybe even yourself. It’s quite freeing to exercise the release from expectation and embrace boundaries. For example, “I don’t owe you, the audience, a carefully-crafted, well-executed showing of a curious new live performance work at Adhocracy”, but I’ll do my damned best to share one with you. Side by side my projects wax and wane in what they’re responding to, and what forms they crave, but there’s a soft thread you can pull on. Resistance, and resilience, and how complex these two things are and continue to be.

Where does ‘I Don’t Owe You’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

It would be pleasant if I knew. Maybe one day we’ll all sit together and watch the sun rise on a better world, and maybe a word or two I once wrote (or a 24-hour endurance bodywork I once performed) is warm dust on that morning breeze.

Anything else audiences should know?

Don’t be afraid. Come say hi. Pluck a beard hair or two. Share the labour.

We chat all things protest and We the People related with multidisciplinary artist Katie Sfetkidis.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.

First of all, tell us about ‘We the People’ – what’s the core concept of the project and what inspired you to pursue it.

The core question is “how has the pandemic changed the way we protest and the way we think about protesting”. It’s a response to the feeling of colliding set of crises – be it climate change, social and economic inequality, colonisation, housing instability, the treatment of refugees, to name a few – set against the issues of public safety.

The work was inspired by my experience of being in lockdown in Melbourne CBD over 2020 and 2021.  It gave me a lot of time to think deeply about issues that I care about, whilst also feeling like I couldn’t participate in public demonstration in the same way, mainly due to public health concerns, but also  shifting public attitudes towards large scale public demonstration and the use of the police in response. I started wondering if there were other ways that we could gather that could circumnavigate some of these issues. I was particularly inspired by the ways people were using digital technology to both connect with others and share ideas within local and global communities and I began to wonder how one could harness the emancipatory powers of digital technology to create a public demonstration that could exist both in a digital realm and IRL.

As an artist, I think it’s really important to civically engage. This work brings together my interest in feminism and the history of activism. In general my practice is influenced by what has come before and ‘We the People’, in a lot of ways feels like an extension and mash up of a number of projects I have worked on over the past few years, including ‘The Feminist Poster Project’ (2020-2021) and ‘The Women’s COVID-19 Time Capsule’ (2020-2022).

This piece explores the intersection between more traditional forms of public demonstration and the digital realm – how has this changed in recent years?

I think the pandemic has had a huge impact on our relationship to technology. Video calls and online gathering spaces are much more common now than they were two years ago, and social media has really been used to drive global social movements, and this has sometimes translated into large scale in person demonstrations – e.g., Black Lives Matter.

What is so exciting to me about these online spaces are the possibilities they open up for new encounters.  For many people, in the early days of the pandemic, video streaming platforms allowed people to access a world and events that had been inaccessible before, perhaps because of chronic illness, disability or cultural and economic reasons. It also allowed people to connect across time and space in different ways.

I am interested in how this might translate to public demonstration. For many reasons, there are people who can’t attend a public demonstration; this could be because of health, age, access, work and family commitments or public safety. I wonder how digital technology can offer an alternative, and a way to bring different groups of people together across space and time.

This seems to be a project that is very interested in the role of ‘political ephemera’ (banners, flags, placards and so on). How will you be depicting that?

Visual material is really important to any public demonstration and will be key to this work. This could be placards and posters, which already feature quite heavily in my practice, but I have dreams to also create some bigger pieces; puppets etc, along the lines of the Burning Koala from a recent Extinction Rebellion demonstration.

At this stage, I am planning on incorporating previous pieces from ‘A Feminist Poster Project’ into this new work and make new signs, banners, and flags.  I really love the idea of flag waving as something that is visually striking and can incorporate movement into the piece. It’s also a key feature for many older activists I have come across in my research and I am keen to unpack this more.

The process of creating this ephemera is just as important as their visual impact. Whilst at Adhocracy, I am inviting people to come and create new posters and banners in the studio that can feature in the work. These creative exercises allow time to think through ideas or talk them through in a communal setting, which works to build community.

Where does ‘We the People’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

In my dreams, ‘We the People’ will be a global event, occurring simultaneously in sites across the globe.  In the short term, I will be undertaking another creative development in Melbourne later this year and continuing to talk with activist communities across Australia. At this stage I also hope to spend some time in NSW and Queensland early next year.

 Anything else audiences should know?

‘We the People’ is just as much about the journey as it is about the final outcome. Like many past projects, I am seeking to engage with women in the community to highlight their efforts and facilitate an exchange of ideas.  I would encourage anyone up for a yarn or just wanted to listen to drop into the open studio/workshops.

We sat down with artist Catherine Ryan to discuss The Two Body Problem.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.

Firstly, tell us about ‘The Two Body Problem’ – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

‘The Two Body Problem’ is an experimental performance lecture that I have just begun to develop. The core concept is a simple speculative question: what if we had not one, but two bodies? What if every human consciousness had a spare body that it could use, instead of always being tied to the same one? How would this change the decisions we made? Would we take care of both our bodies and spend equal amounts of time in each one, or would we just spend time in the ‘good’ body and leave the other one at home? And what is a ‘good’ body, anyway?

As for what inspired it, in the most literal sense, like many artists, I have a huge document in my phone’s Notes app, full of half-baked ideas and questions that have popped into my head. One day, I was scrolling back through this vast collection of musings when I came across this question about what it would be like if we had two bodies. I don’t even remember when I wrote it. Was it something that I scrawled while I was out late one night, perhaps? I’ll never know. But it seemed compelling, even in the harsh, more critical light of day, so I started to draw more connections from it. 

I have a background in European philosophy, so it occurred to me that there are swathes of thinkers who have considered the potential duality of the body. Early Christian theological disputes about whether God and Jesus were different bodies or not. Mediaeval political theology about the two bodies of the King. Cartesian accounts of dualism – the idea that the mind is separate from the body. And more recently, discussions within Queer theory about whether or not we can speak of there being a body, prior to its existence in language, or considerations within disability studies about the difference between impairment (which is in some sense ‘inherent’) and disability (which is socially derived).

And importantly for me, not only have philosophers and theorists written about multiplicity of the body – pop singers have sung about it.

The phrase ‘experimental performance lecture’ is a fascinating one – how does this differ from the more traditional concept of a lecture and how are you subverting the academic?

The performance lecture, as a type of performance, has a history that goes back several decades, to 1960s conceptual practice, which emphasised process over finished product. Early notable practitioners of the mode include Robert Morris and Andrea Fraser. Central to this type of work is its existence between the frames of performance and academic address. Performance lectures explore the gaps and tensions between theatrical performance and academic and pedagogical contexts. They often play with authority – the authority of the figure standing in front of you as “the expert”, presenting indisputable facts about the world.

In my performance lectures to date, this playfulness has often manifested in my choice to use cheesy, well-known pop songs as entrance points into the consideration of political or philosophical questions. My techniques have also included the interruption of authoritative textual address by singing, dancing and humorous over-analysis of pop music.

You’ve identified some intriguing pop music artefacts that you’ll be utilising – what inspired their selection?

One of the ways that I often work when making performance lectures is to select a small group of pop songs – usually songs that I like myself – and then use them as unusual ways of entering into questions of a philosophical or political nature.

One of the first tracks that inspired this project was SOPHIE’s Immaterial Girl. It’s a stunning track (and it’s awful that SOPHIE’s untimely death means that we won’t get more of her incredible work). Against a hyperactive synth riff, a chipmunky voice sings about whether she would exist and be gendered without all these things that she enumerates:

 

“Without my legs or my hair

Without my genes or my blood

With no name and with no type of story

Where do I live?

Tell me, where do I exist?”

 

What a question! She seems to be asking whether gender can be considered as this radically abstract thing that doesn’t need a body at all.

I then started thinking about how there are all these songs about the materiality of the body. There’s Beyoncé’s 2006 track Get Me Bodied, for instance. This song opens with Beyoncé dramatically intoning “9… 4… 8… 1… B-Day!”. These numbers are the date that Beyonce was born – the 4th of September 1981, her birthday, or B-Day. In the context of the song, this is the day that Beyonce got a body, or got bodied. Does this mean that, prior to 1981, Beyoncé existed in some form, without a body? Was there an eternal, incorporeal form of Beyoncé floating through the universe before this? How tied is Beyoncé to her body?

These are the sorts of questions that inspire me. Also, these are excellent songs, and it’s fun to think with them.

Where does ‘The Two Body Problem’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

Somewhere, I hope! This is a first stage development so the piece will need more work after this before it’s performable and tourable.

Anything else audiences should know?

I’d love for them to come along to some of the workshops I’ll be running over the Adhocracy weekend. As part of the development in Adhocracy, I’m planning on running some casual discussions about the opening philosophical provocations of the project. These will be small group discussions where we can think together about questions like: Can you imagine having two bodies? What would you do if they were very different bodies? Would you change how you lived? I’d love to consider some of these questions with new groups of people.

With residencies at Vitalstatistix in April and May, two projects now in development address questions of labour and pleasure, embodiment, sex work, and online/IRL interactions.

The Read is a collaboration between dancer and choreographer Amrita Hepi and writer, sex worker and activist Tilly Lawless, investigating labour, desire, and bodies and their mechanics, drawing on Amrita’s interests in participatory research, intimate conversations and resilience.

Artists amira.h. and Monte Masi are collaborating on Goddess Ball’s Fun House, using text, performance and endurance to explore the online world of adult camming sites, the nature of work and play, and the true meaning of fun.

Jennifer Mills spoke with both these creative duos over Zoom about their works in progress, collaborative practices, friendship and trust, labour and time, adaptation, pleasure, and making meaningful work.

JM Starting with amira and Monte. Where did the idea spring from to work together?

Monte Masi amira’s and my relationship goes back a fair while, we both studied at the South Australian School of Art at around the same time, but this project is our first time directly collaborating. The first development was part of last year’s Adhocracy at Vitalstatistix and because of “the situation” (laughs), amira and I spent the Adhocracy weekend in 2021 working at a distance over Zoom.

This project really begins with you, amira, sharing an artist’s book – a piece of collected text that you had been amassing, which was text from camming sites’ chat rooms. amira eventually sent me a 2,000 page pdf of that which went by the same name, ‘Goddess Ball’s Fun House.’ And amira had mentioned sharing that text amongst a few people and inviting a response, so whoever had the honour of receiving the text might become obligated to create a response.

amira.h. The text was collected from October 2018 to 2020 sometime, but then I went back and got more, which I haven’t actually added to the ibook file I sent you… it’s not a pdf, it is specific because the pdf has lots of emojis and they don’t move but I wanted people to see what I was seeing on the sites, which is a lot of emojis, emoticons I call them, and they’re very different from other social media, very specific to these sites. So yep, it was a 2,000 or so page ibook.

JM That’s a weighty tome! Why did you start collecting this document?

a.h. Well, that’s what I do – I collect stuff, even at uni I would give people postcards and tell them to text me a response and then I created a book – I called it a book – of pages stuck on the wall, of people’s responses to me. That was in the hundreds, just text responses. I like collecting things.

JM It sounds like a very zine-influenced practice to me.

a.h. I do love zines, definitely.

MM You were going to curate an exhibition based on these responses.

a.h. That was Dominic Guerrera’s idea, he works at Country Arts, and he suggested we could show it at Nexus, but that just didn’t feel right. So then Monte asked me to be an assistant to a whole other project, and I was living on Kaurna land, in Adelaide, but now I’m not, so I had moved and Monte asked if I could still assist and I said I didn’t know, and then he said Vitals have this Adhocracy thing due tomorrow, let’s just quickly write up a proposal (laughs).

MM I saw us putting together the Adhocracy application as a continuation of your invitation to think of a response to that text. I thought we could create that response together.

JM I love that Adhocracy is a space that you can jump on at those moments. It sounds like this project has been through a few versions of itself, are you still taking a digital/online approach?

a.h. It is definitely morphing. Recently Monte said ‘I don’t want to have Zooms or livestreams in our work!’ We want it to be in real life, IRL.

JM There was a lot of excitement around the potential of online spaces but now there’s so much fatigue as well, people are really happy to be able to be physically with each other again.

a.h. It’s true. In my head I kind of see a live chat, you know, I definitely wouldn’t want to show any of the people on the websites, so I want to be able to zone in on the chat and have that accessible in the space, and that might be the only online component.

MM I am certainly cognisant of that snap-back to the way things were. It was great to have a lot of stuff over Zoom and suddenly people being quite invested in livestream, even for me as someone who thinks of themselves as able-bodied or reasonably mobile, it was a treat to be able to for example catch something in New York that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, let alone how it might have felt for someone who actually finds it incredibly difficult to get into a theatre or a performance space. But I think maybe it’s because the first time we really had a development for this work we had to do it over the screen, I just think a lot of the ideas and a lot of the forms that we’re imagining and dreaming of for this work are things that you do in front of other people.

JM Are you going to retain a participatory element of that, with people whose conversation you’re using as source material?

a.h. I have got some ideas, but Monte and I haven’t decided on anything concrete yet.

JM In terms of working out those kind of mechanisms or ideas, what’s your process as a collaboration?

a.h. We try to have Zoom meetings every 2-3 weeks. I text Monte all the time, probably annoyingly, if I get an idea I just send it to him, it’s very spontaneous for me and that’s what I like about it.

MM In some ways it has been fairly spontaneous but it’s also been quite discursive, in that sometimes we will have what is ostensibly a meeting which will end up with you, amira, telling me particular details of a particular period in your life or a particular kind of online web of intrigue, and going down a sort of rabbithole of different things, and trusting to do that while not knowing whether it really lives in the world of the work.

JM While we’re talking about these blurring boundaries I’m going to let Amrita and Tilly into the meeting. We’ve just been talking about collaboration and the way that art and life blend a little in the process. Amrita and Tilly were you friends before you started this project together?

Tilly Lawless We knew each other vaguely but we have definitely become closer through doing it.

Amrita Hepi Tilly made a really good point today, that because this has been so delayed it’s been a nice way to get to know each other. If we had started 2.5 years ago when we were originally supposed to start, maybe it would have been harder. I feel like there was material generated in speaking to each other and getting to know each other.

We had this conversation about the kind of economy that the arts runs on, the economy of friendship, that obviously there is a camaraderie, and it’s one of the most beautiful things, but that it can also be really abusive in some ways.

JM Totally. It can manifest as exploitative labour practices very quickly.

TL There is a level of trust that has come with knowing each other for the last few years that makes me feel like I can trust what Amrita says in the room.

I think that if we’d started not knowing each other well that I would have been quite tentative, and I don’t feel that. I feel quite confident in voicing my opinion. I only see the friendship as positive. I understand that people can exploit friendships in order to get certain artistic things from people or to not pay people for their labour but I haven’t felt like that one bit.

AH I said to Tilly at the start that sometimes there can be a tyranny of structurelessness: we’re improvising, we’re trying things, the hierarchies are different, and in the room I am performing in it too, I’m in it with you. But I am the director. I will be making the work. And I think there is a nice trust that comes from knowing that is your responsibility.

JM It builds trust when there’s a bit of clarity around roles.

TL A director is the same role you would get when, as a writer, you have an editor editing your work. You have someone that has more power than you, you’ve agreed to them having a say over what you’re doing, and you trust them in the critiques that they’re going to give… I wouldn’t say yes to being directed by someone unless I respected that they could direct me well.

JM I wanted to ask all four of you a bit more about process as labour but also process as play, and where that sits for you as a collaboration and how you manage that balance?

MM Before, I used that word discursive, but in some ways what I mean is also playful, as playful as you can be in a chat over Zoom, where yes, you are in theory trying to advance a project but you are also trying to work out what are the possible boundaries for the project so that you are creating some sense of what is inside the world of the work before we get started with our residency at Vitalstatistix. For us it has up to this point been about play. And we’ve been talking a lot about fun anyway within the work – we have this title of Goddess Ball’s Fun House so there’s been fun stuff and fool stuff. We’re getting a piece of neon fabricated that says ‘FUN.’

AH The way that I like to work is fast and relaxed, but I spent a good part of my early dance career working in companies that didn’t feel that way – where everything felt serious and sombre and we needed to get it right. I think I thought for a long time that it really needed to be that way. I use this analogy of when I stopped using birth control, when I switched to another kind of birth control and because it didn’t hurt I wasn’t sure it was working, I wasn’t sure it was real. There’s an idea that if I’m not having some kind of epiphany or I’m not having a struggle… I mean it really doesn’t need to be that way.

JM There’s this ‘if you’re not suffering, you’re not making work’ mentality. I think a lot of us have absorbed this hyper-employment model as sole traders or practitioners where we do push ourselves and work really long hours.

MM And that’s the logic of the project in some ways anyway. It always wants to see a peak at the moment of presentation, it always wants you to go a bit beyond yourself to get something done.

TL My relationship to it is a bit different because I have my job that I do for money and I work really hard at it and then everything I do that is creative is fun.

AH But also I wouldn’t have asked you to come and do it just for fun and I won’t pay you!

TL Obviously the pay matters, but I don’t have the sense of, ‘is art only real if there’s suffering involved?’ because I have always enjoyed the things that I do creatively, whereas I often don’t enjoy my daily work.

AH The other thing is not just if there’s suffering involved, but is the labour real if there isn’t a moment of transformation? If it’s hard and if it looks like it’s easy, is it still labour? Or if it has a feeling of effortlessness is it really labour?

JM And there’s a crossover there with sex work as well, if it’s pleasurable is it still labour?

TL My relationship to fun has changed since the pandemic. Before the pandemic I would have thought what a drag to go leave my house for two weeks and do this thing and be in a studio all day and now it’s so much fun to be in another state, and to be in a big room with someone. I have turned from being a glass half empty person before the pandemic to glass half full. I am getting scraps of fun out of everything.

JM There’s a real element of joy in returning to working physically close to each other … is that infecting the work, that craving for physicality and being in space?

AH Yeah, absolutely. Over Zoom, we haven’t figured out how to manufacture improvisation in quite the same way. Real time allows for an ease of working. Number one, this is how I have always known how to make. Number two, I think it is really much more enjoyable. Even if it is hard to be away from home, doing this in another way or not together would just not be possible.

MM For me and amira, the first stage development for this work was at Adhocracy in 2021 but we had to do that over Zoom. So I was in the basement at the Waterside hall chatting to amira on screen. There were a couple of Adelaide-based projects that did have their creative teams with them and I was eyeing them off with a slight jealousy: ‘They’re all talking to each other without a delay!’ I think in a way the thought of being in a room together has driven some of the ideas about what we’re going to do in our upcoming couple of weeks.

JM That desire has to infect the work, especially as the work is already about desire. The desire for physical closeness is already in it.

a.h. It’s really exciting to be performing IRL. I’ve been doing online stuff from about 2016, I was just doing that ‘for fun’ because it was so novel, like Periscope – but being in a physical space, I am imagining how we can utilise smell and taste and touch…

JM Can I ask you about the idea of failure and mistakes in your work? Monte, you have spoken about misperformance as a strategy, and that really resonates with my experience of being genderqueer.

MM We have these scripts that we follow – you could think about it as a dramatic script but you might also think about it as a cultural script – and by not performing well or by failing to appear in the proper way, it might be generative. So by misperforming that script you might be able to generate something new. Which is connected to ideas in The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, and to writing by José Esteban Muñoz and other theorists.

JM There is also great potential for comedy in that.

MM Performing things in a totally committed but very wrong way is connected to what clowns do, and playing the fool.

a.h. I have always embraced failure. I mean, growing up as a queer Muslim woman, I thought I was going to kill myself by the time I was fifteen…

JM Society tells you that you don’t deserve to live.

a.h. Yes. I’m the eldest child out of four, I’m the one who is the fuckup – I don’t own my house, I am unmarried, I don’t have kids, to society I am a failure, so I have embraced that in lots of my work. I fuck up and you have to accept it. I have accepted that I don’t adhere to rules, even rules I set myself.

JM: When you’re discovering your creativity as a queer artist, it’s a huge lesson to know that that’s where the sparks are, in the fuckups and the failures and the not fitting right.

AH Definitely in that stuff. But also in the mundanity of the existence of the failure. We’ve been asking about assumptions. What do people assume about what it is that you’re doing at work? And what’s the reality? So one of the exercises we have is I ask Tilly, what do you think people assume about sex work, or about writing? And vice versa, around the labour of being a dancer. What a day of work is like, what the architecture looks like in the space, where you are, what you’re doing with your body, what happens? The things we think are mundane actually reveal something about the unconscious, about what the other is assuming about us.

JM And it absolutely reveals the structures under that work as well, physical structures and temporal structures and the embodiment of the labour that you’re doing – a lot of creative labour is quite invisible to the general public.

AH There are three zones, in the way I’ve been thinking. There’s the desire to do – the desire to act in both our labours. Then there’s the labour itself and what it’s worth or what its value is perceived to be. And then there are examples of other people in labour, or other objects that are desirable, that feed into this.

TL There is some assumed knowledge with the audience in that we assume they know that both dance and sex work are labour.

AH But then there’s what it’s worth, and what it looks like, and what happens before the event. What leads you into a performance, and what makes it good? How do you make something good? That is actually kind of nebulous.

JM With literature and dance, there’s a perception that they spring almost spontaneously from the body, that you don’t require external resources to make them.

AH Yes, ‘you can do it anywhere.’ I was talking to a friend who wrote a beautiful article and they said it really poured out of them, and I love that word pour. There is so much stored that is maybe conscious or unconscious or that maybe we just heard yesterday that makes its way into the room, the rehearsal room. You realise how much you know about something that you didn’t know you knew.

JM That deep archival knowledge that you have to draw on from longer practice is one of the great pleasures of getting older in a creative career. And also your networks grow and so your ability to draw on others’ knowledge grows.

AH You have a reference point and maybe you have watched work that you can then take into your own methodology, because there’s a tone of understanding, rather than just going: I need it to be good, and how the fuck do I get there.

As an emerging artist, what I didn’t know… maybe there was also nothing to lose.

MM In some ways I would agree. When I was an emerging artist you did feel like you were running on energy. I couldn’t even imagine what the possible consequences would be of failing, I was just doing stuff.

AH As you get better, you have a better understanding of your own aesthetic.

Now I am thinking about things more sustainably, like if I’m making this work maybe I want to be able to show it in a different context, not be [hammers hands] bang-bang-bang. The Read feels like it’s been ruminating for a while and I’d like for it to be able to take the time it needs to take and also have the chance to be in different formats and different contexts. I know a bit more about what I’m interested in in terms of subject and material.

TL I’ve found it really useful not to tie my identity to what I create. If it’s not good, it doesn’t matter too much. I’m still a person beyond what I created, my friends are still going to like me, I’m still going to have a great life. Not everything you do ends up being as you’ve imagined it before you do it. So I just try to not tie myself to those things too much. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t put in all your energy or all your hopes. But your life is full beyond what you created as an artist.

AH I worked with a dance theatre company called Marrugeku for a long time and it taught me to make from this reactionary place. In some ways I still do, something will niggle at me. Sometimes the politic of something overwhelms the poetic; it can suck out the fun. You think you have to perform the politic by which it is perceived.

This is not what Marrugeku does, they do it with a poetics that then infects the politics. With making now, it doesn’t feel as fraught with having to express the politics, because it is already there. And it can be fun.

TL I realised quite quickly that I don’t want it to be a professional career, I love writing and I will always write but I don’t want to pursue it as a career, it ruins my enjoyment of it. I like it too much to ruin that.

MM I have seen people do really weird things in order to try and find or keep that sense of pleasure or openness alive. With all sorts of artists, anyone who is able to derive some income from what they make, there is a recognition that once you start to have people really interested in what you’re doing or you’re creating opportunities that are being recognised by others, that there is a danger that what makes a thing fun and possible can be extinguished or leave you.

JM I think it’s also a really exciting thing that art does, finding these cracks where things that are work don’t feel like work. It’s possible to do that in every job – every job can and should have those moments of ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this, it’s so fun.’

AH I have a query around that because I don’t just make art for the good feeling. I am not necessarily interested in making people feel good or entertained. I guess it’s like the panic and stretch zones, still trying to find the way into being enjoyable but there is also the fiscal financial stuff that comes into it. Then there’s this other thing: a part of my revenue stream, if I’m honest, is using dance as a commercial tool. So there’s movement direction for advertisements, or myself as the subject modelling for things and talking about the fact that I’m a dancer. People ask ‘how could you do that?’

But are we only ever doing it for a good feeling or for our community? That’s part of it, but I do not believe for a second that that is the only reason we’re doing it.

JM Maybe the pleasure is not the end point. The pleasure is like a window into meaningful work. It’s a clue that the universe has left us that we can follow.

AH To purpose. We’ve been talking about that in our work, about identity and class, and the big example we’ve been talking about is the allegory of the turnspit dog. The turnspit dog would run on this wheel like a hamster wheel that would turn the meat and cook it. Then at the turn of the industrial revolution, with electricity, all of a sudden it didn’t have a purpose anymore, and it was then bred out.

Being in the Port, I think about work and art and labour, and striking. When workers talk about striking, they withdraw their labour, but for artists that doesn’t make sense – they’ll just find somebody else. And then that leads into thinking about the gig economy, and it’s all so soupy – personally finding the pleasure and purpose fits into something that’s a much bigger machination.

JM I feel like I’m haunted now by the ghost of my future redundancy.

AH There is that nebulous fear: a GPT-3 AI wrote this…

JM Oh absolutely. There are already AIs that could substitute for some of my freelance work quite easily.

AH I am so curious and suspicious about that dream that we’ll be overwhelmed by machines. The fear that we wouldn’t be able to work anymore if the machines take over. I think it’s almost a desire: ‘Oh no, don’t take the work away!’

a.h. Talking about labour, the start of Goddess Ball’s Fun House came about through my body being so injured that I couldn’t work. So I was a personal shopper for one of the huge supermarkets for nine months, and then ended up with carpal tunnel, hip bursitis, tendonitis… I couldn’t walk anymore. And a friend suggested to get into the camming world. I was living on my own, didn’t have a fridge for about six months, and I was on the dole.

I didn’t start this for pleasure. It was out of pain. Survival sex work.

Andy Kaufman is a big influence on this work. Andy only does something if it’s fun, if it’s not fun he stops doing it. But if you delve into his online world at the moment, it’s not fun at all.

The root word of fun is actually fool. Monte and I have done a lot of research about the Fool card in tarot, which is the zero. Not the start and not the end, but a liminal card. I feel like I have been on a Fool’s journey with these online lives that I have lived. I’ve played the fool and I’ve been made fun of. Fun isn’t always pleasurable.

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The Read showings: 5 & 6 MAY at 7pm – BOOK HERE

Goddess Ball’s Fun House showings: 19 & 20 MAY at 7pm  – BOOK HERE

Photo credit: Emma Luker for Replay Creative (@replaycreative on Instagram)

Vitalstatistix has made the extremely difficult decision to cancel the public program of events for this year’s Adhocracy, our experimental art lab and festival, scheduled to take place 3-5 September.

Adhocracy is a national arts event that takes place in South Australia; and as a national event it has been dramatically affected by the COVID-19 Delta outbreak, and subsequent lockdowns and travel restrictions.

60% of participating artists cannot attend the event. Two thirds of the projects have had their plans significantly impacted. The program of showings and work-in-progress outcomes that we planned to offer audiences has been substantially affected.

The current climate means that the spirit of Adhocracy – its national nature and the sense of togetherness that develops between both artists and audiences – has been compromised, and we don’t believe that yet another swift pivot to an online format would be of benefit to artists or audiences. The priority for our organisation is the mental health of the people we work with. The show does not have to go on.

All artists, and the casual staff arranged for the event, will be paid in full. Restrictions permitting, South Australian artists will have access to our venues Waterside and Hart’s Mill, as well as the resources of Vitalstatistix, to develop their works.

We made this decision in consultation with, and the full support of, participating artists. Most artists intend to undertake development of their projects, either from their homes, or in Waterside and Hart’s Mill for South Australian-based artists. Adhocracy has always been about supporting and centring artists and their processes, and this decision brings it back to simply focusing on the works themselves.

The Vitals team will use the finite time and energy we would have expended on delivering a high pressure, COVID-19 safe public event, to provide further curatorial and caring support directly to the artists and their projects.

Under pandemic conditions, artists and arts organisations are being asked to continuously undertake acts of unfair and harmful cognitive dissonance in the face of known unknowns, in order to attempt to deliver cultural products to a public. In this instance, for a creative development program of the kind that Adhocracy is, we strongly believe we have made a caring decision that gives certainty, relief, and support to our Adhocracy 2021 cohort. It’s a decision that reduces pressure and that matches reality rather than denies it.

We know that loyal Adhocracy audiences will be disappointed, and we trust that you will understand. It is disappointing that this will be the first time in 12 years of Adhocracy that we are unable to run a public program for this signature Vitalstatistix event, however we are grateful to have the full support of our funding partners Arts South Australia and the Australia Council for the Arts, who have secured Adhocracy’s future in 2022 and 2023 through recent funding.

Please join us for our next presentation; Emission by Sweeney / König, 16 – 18 September, and please read about the Adhocracy projects here.

In solidarity,
Emma Webb
Director, Vitalstatistix

At the beginning of September, Vitalstatistix presented Adhocracy, our national arts hothouse. Adhocracy featured nine project and around forty artists, all developing new experimental and multidisciplinary artworks. You can read about why Adhocracy (and the artists it supports) are important here.

This year’s commissioned residency project for Adhocracy was Second Hand Emotions, led by Mish Grigor, Sarah Rodigari and SJ Norman with South Australian artists Celeste Martin, Grace Marlow, Jennifer Greer Holmes, Rebecca Meston, Sarah-Jayde Tracey and Suzannah Kennett Lister.

Second Hand Emotions was a queer, unashamedly process-driven and discursive project responding to the provocation of ‘love and feminism’. The Second Hand Emotions zine, produced during the residency, can be seen at Fontanelle’s Love & Feminism exhibition on until 8 October as part of FRAN.

For our (slightly belated!) September blog we are publishing a speech delivered by the Second Hand Emotions lead artists at the opening event on Friday 1 September.

Our next Vital Conversations blog in October will feature a solo interview with artist Rebecca Conroy, also discussion feminist themes of affective and emotional labour, and her work Iron Lady in development with Vitalstatistix and Performance & Art Development Agency during November as part of the Feast Festival.

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WE TALKED

WE STARTED BY TALKING

WE’VE BEEN TALKING FOR TWELVE DAYS

WE’RE STILL TALKING NOW (AND …..NOW)

WE MADE LISTS

WE INTERROGATED EACH OTHER

WE ASKED NICELY

WE CATEGORISED IT AS A COLLOQUIAL DISCURSIVE MODE

WOMEN SITTING IN A CIRCLE TALKING

(NO, PEOPLE SITTING IN A CIRCLE TALKING)

WE COVERED LOTS OF GROUND

WE DEFINED AFFECTIVE LABOUR

SOME OF US GOOGLED PHILOSOPHICAL TERMS

WE TALKED ABOUT WAVES OF FEMINISM

WE TALKED ABOUT WAVES OF EMOTION

WE WERE LOST IN A SEA OF CONTRADICTIONS.

 

WE WORKED 10-5

BUT REALLY WE STARTED AT 11, THE REAL WORK STARTED AT 11. BEFORE THAT WAS COFFEE, AND WRITING, AND CHECK INS.

WE MADE ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE, WE MIGHT JUST MAKE ANOTHER POT OF COFFEE?.

WE DECIDED NOT TO GIVE ANY HOMEWORK

BUT THEN WE GAVE A BIT, BUT WE IT WASNT REALLY HOMEWORK, IT WAS ALMOST HOMEWORK, SO IT WAS STOOP WORK.

WE TALKED ABOUT EMOTIONS

WE TALKED ABOUT ART

WE TALKED ABOUT POLITICS

WE TALKED ABOUT LIFE

TENDERNESS. RAGE. GRIEF. LOVE

 

WE TALKED ABOUT FUCKING.

THEN WE WOULD GO HOME AND THE REAL WORK WOULD START

THEN WE WOULD DO THE OTHER WORK THAT WE HAVE TO DO FOR OUR OTHER JOB, OUR MONEY JOB. THEN WE WERE TIRED BECAUSE WE REALISED WE WERE WORKING ALL DAY AND WORKING ALL NIGHT.

WE WORKED IT OUT

WE INVITED GUESTS

WE BROUGHT IN EXPERTS

WE HAD A SKYPE

WE HARDLY EVER AGREED BUT WE WERE USUALLY PRETTY POLITE ABOUT IT

WE TALKED ABOUT FEMINIST HISTORIES

WE TALKED ABOUT ART HEROES

WE TALKED ABOUT PROJECTS THAT WE MIGHT MAKE

WE TALKED THROUGH OUR HISTORIES

WE DEFINED OUR EXTENDED ANCESTRY

WE TALKED ABOUT INSTAGRAM EYEBROWS

WE TALKED ABOUT THE SOMATISATION OF EMOTIONAL

 

WE ASKED QUESTIONS

WE WERE LATE

WE ARRIVED EARLY

WE SPLIT INTO GROUPS

 

WE DIDNT HAVE A BOSS

WE DIDNT HAVE A LEADER

WE WERE ALL LEADERS

SOME LEADERS SPEAK MORE THAN OTHER LEADERS

WE LAUGHED

WE WONDERED IF SOMEONE WOULD CRY

WE MADE FUN OF EACH OTHER

WE TRIED TO LISTEN

WE TALKED ABUOT THE BODY

WE TALKED ABOUT THE MIND

WE TALKED ABOUT THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE TRIED TO EXORCISE THE DEMONS OF THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE TRIED TO DISPEL THE MYTH OF THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE FELL BACK, EVEN US, ON THE CARTESIAN SPLIT

WE WERENT SURE HOW TO SHARE ALL THIS WITH YOU

WE WERE TIRED AT THE END OF EACH DAY

 

WE WERE TALKING AS A POLITICAL ACT. WE WERE TALKING AS A SPACE OF ACTION. WE TALKED ABOUT TALKING AS A RIGHT AND PRIVILEGE AND WE TALKED IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THE TIMES WE HAVE BEEN SILENCED. WE TALKED TOGETHER IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THE TIMES WE HAVE BEEN ALONE. WE TALKED ABOUT TALKING AS A WAY THAT AFFECTIVE LABOUR MANIFESTS.

WE HAD A WINE

WE HAD A WINE

WE HAD A WINE

WE USED THE WORD CUNT AND RECLAIMED THE WORD PUSSY

WE HAD ANOTHER WINE

WE WENT PERSONAL WE WENT POLITICAL WE WENT INTERSECTIONAL

 

 

WE ASKED QUESTIONS – ARE YOU A WOMAN? HOW DO YOU KNOW?

WHAT SHAPE DOES RAGE TAKE? WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE VIOLENT?

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CARED FOR SOMEONE?

 

WE ASKED VIRGINIA WOOLF, WE ASKED AUDRE LORDE. LESLEY FEINEBERG. MAGGIE NELSON. NINA SIMONE. TWIN PEAKS.

 

MY BACK CATALOGUE YOUR BACK CATALOGUE

WE WONDERED IF YOU CAN COMMUNICATE TWELVE DAYS OF CONVERSATION IN FIVE MINUTES

WE WONDERED IF WE COULD ENCAPSULATE IN THAT OUTCOME ON WHAT IS INHERENTLY AN OPEN ENDED NON DIDACTIC MULTIFACETED DIALOGICAL SPACE OF SELF REFLECTION AND SHARED FRUSTRATION

WE FIGURED OUT THAT YOU CANT ENCAPSULATE IT

 

WE FIGURED THAT YOU CANT EXPRESS IT

THERE’S NOTHING IN HERE ABOUT COLONIALISM

BUT WE KEPT IT IN THE ROOM, ALWAYS

WE TRIED TO KEEP IT IN THE ROOM, ALWAYS

WE STARTED OUR FORTNIGHT WITH A DECOLONISING GESTURE, AND WE CARRY THAT WITH US NOW, AT THE END.

 

WE WONDERED WHAT ELSE WE MIGHT TAKE AWAY FROM IT ALL

WE PROPOSED MOVING SILENCE INTO ACTION

WE WONDERED WHAT WE MIGHT IMPART TO YOU

WE WANT TO SAY THANKS FOR HAVING US

WE THINK WE’LL BE THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR A WHILE

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Image: The entire Second Hand Emotions artists on the final night of Adhocracy. 

 

Vitalstatistix spoke with artists SJ Norman and Meg Wilson about their multidisciplinary practices, the queering of feminism, and their upcoming projects for Adhocracy 2017.

SJ Norman is a multidisciplinary artist and writer.  Their work traverses performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. Norman’s primary medium is the body and live performance remains the core of their practice: working with extended duration, task-based, and endurance practices, as well as intimate/one-to-one frameworks. They are a proud Indigenous Australian of both Wiradjuri and European heritage. They are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions.

Meg Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist who works predominantly with large-scale and site-specific installation and performance. Her visual art and theatre design practices are mutually influential and frequently overlap. Meg aims to provoke imposed perplexity, uneasiness and a sense of drama in the everyday, through explorations of the performativity of space and the audience encounter with the ordinary, set within the context of the out-of-the-ordinary. She is developing live art event SQUASH! at Adhocracy 2017.

Meg and SJ, tell us a bit more about your practices and your artistic communities.

SJ Norman: I make a lot of different things but I’m mainly known for my performance and installation work, and my writing. Many people would call me a live artist, which is fine.

My artistic community is a very dense rhizome which stretches across the globe. It includes quite a lot of people who would not call themselves artists.

Meg Wilson: I’m very fortunate to have an artistic practice that spans several disciplines, from visual and live art to performance and design for theatre. This has come out of fairly unconscious desire not to be defined by or associated with any one genre or form. I started out as a painter and became known as a textile artist, then an installation artist. After art school, I studied interior design and eventually found my way into design for theatre, allowing me to satisfy a constant eagerness for making and resistance to monotony between personal projects.

As I have largely gained experience by volunteering and interning with various companies and designers that I admire, I have managed to form meaningful and supportive relationships with a diverse and extremely generous group of makers and collaborators that I can now call upon for guidance – locally, nationally and somewhat internationally.

It is the overwhelming generosity, sharp intelligence and sheer bloody persistent guts of my community that excites me and allows me to see a future for what we do.

SJ, you are co-leading this year’s Adhocracy residency project Second Hand Emotions with Mish Grigor and Sarah Rodigari. You will be joined by a team of local artists to explore the theme of ‘love and feminism’. What does this theme conjure for you?

SJN: The very first thing that springs to mind is the question of affective labour. I want to know what a “Labour Of Love” really looks like under late-capitalism. Certainly one of the most enduring questions of Feminist discourse is that of the feminization and devaluation of specific kinds of work: un-waged reproductive labour, certainly, but also the care and service professions.  I think about how we do or do not value this kind of labour, how it is distributed, how some bodies are burdened with a greater expectation to provide it than others.

I think, also, about how individual potential to convert this labour into capital- be it monetary or otherwise- is determined by numerous governing factors; if we use very broad brushstrokes, we would say: principally race and class. There are infinite levels of nuance to unpack underneath that, though.

I think, also, about how Feminism as a discourse has had, and retains, a more difficult relationship to certain types of affective labour than others: I’m referring, specifically, to sex work. When you say the words “Feminism and Love” to me I am going to think about the monetization of love and the burden of societal stigma that exclusion which is the reality for so many people who find economic agency by trading emotional and sexual labour. I think, specifically, about the systematic exclusion of sex workers and advocates from the broader terrain of feminist politics and discourse, the way that mainstream White Feminism continues not just to fail sex workers, but to actively work against them. This, along with Transgender rights, have come to the fore (once again) as the battle lines along which one type of Feminist is distinguished from another.

A lot of people are calling this a generational divide, but as far as I can see, this is demonstrably untrue: I know plenty of SWERF’s in their 20’s, and plenty of radical sex work advocates in their 70’s.

Generally, I think about all the sex workers in my life who expend their life energy fighting abolitionists, people who would no doubt identify themselves as Feminists, who are intent on pushing back on their rights, denying their agency and dehumanising them generally. I think about how little this community sees by way of solidarity. I think about how endlessly exhausting this is for a great many people I love and it enrages me, frankly.

I think about what love can look like as a radical act: I think about Audre Lorde’s oft-misquoted doctrine of self-care. I think about what love as resistance looks like, what radical vulnerability and generosity look like. I think, especially, about what that looks like in the context of a de-colonial politic. I think about the love that exists between people who share struggle. I think about de-colonising desire, and what that looks like. I think about the love that is held in abundance by Elders of all kinds.

I think about how words like “No” and “Fuck You” can also be said with love. I think about the loving rage that sometimes seizes me and forces action.

I think also, about the twisted and damaged love I’ve received, as a survivor of both familial and intimate partner violence.  In all cases the perpetrators were women, who called themselves Feminists.  People are complicated. So is love. The myth of Feminine nurturance is a pervasive and deeply oppressive one.

I think about my marriage, which is not recognised legally in this country.   I think about the love I have for my wife, and the love they have for me. I think about our ironic use of the word “wifey” for each other even though neither of us identify with womanhood, much less wife-hood. I think about what this word marriage means when we apply it to the daily lives of two non-binary, feminine presenting trans people, who are spurious of any state sanctioning of our relationship, but very happily chose to engage it anyway, on our own terms.

I think of the ferocity of love that comes from my Tiddas. I think about how the word Sister, when it comes from an Aboriginal person and especially, a feminine person, holds an entirely different bond of kinship and solidarity and love than when it comes from a white woman. I have a white sister- my immediate blood sister to a different mother- and she is the only non-Aboriginal person I would ever suffer to address me in this way.

As a non-binary transperson I don’t permit the use of feminized forms of endearment or address in relationship to me by anyone, at any time, with the exception of Blak kin. I think about how both love and feminism mean profoundly different things in different contexts.

Given all of that, it’s not surprising then, that Feminist is a term that I struggle with. But then, I don’t know any Revisionist Feminists (and I guess that’s my species) who don’t struggle with the term Feminist and the weight of complex expectation and ambivalence that comes with it. I struggle with it in the same way I struggle with Queer, with trans, with non-binary, and, in a different but intersecting way, with Aboriginal. I struggle in the sense that all of these words denote both an identity, an embodied and encultured experience, a struggle, and a political and theoretical terrain which extends far beyond the boundaries a singular terminology could mark out. They contain multitudes and they contain deep conflict, and in all cases it’s a conflict that pervades my life and my body. They are absolutely structural to my existence in the word. And yet, their failure is also inherent. They can only function as placeholder text for something far more immense and slippery. That is not to diminish any of them, or to diminish the richness and the functional political value of language. But it becomes problematic when we assume a commonality of meaning.

What does it mean for me to claim the title of Feminist, when Julie Bindle or Shiela Jeffries call themselves by the same name, and our politics bear absolutely zero resemblance to each other?

I’m generally more at home calling myself a militant Blak non-binary Queer than I am with calling myself a Feminist. Which is not to say I reject the term of the discourse, either. Not at all. I’m just more personally invested resisting gender-based oppression than I am in upholding what seems like a fairly nebulous, flawed and highly selective agenda called “Women’s Rights”. I don’t even know what that is, beyond a fairly narrow set of parameters that excludes me and almost everyone I care about.

Meg, SQUASH! is the third in a trilogy of works about sport, women, aggression and competition. What draws you to these themes?

MW: I feel like there was a point in my life where I made the decision to become an artist over an athlete. Somehow I thought that as a woman becoming an artist was more feasible than making a living as an athlete. I find sport fascinating as a kind of microcosm or intensified version of everyday life. It allows for behaviour and attitudes that are rarely accepted outside of sport, and yet these are attitudes and behaviours that can still be frowned upon for female athletes.

Women, aggression and competitive nature are very interesting areas of investigation. I have experienced high levels of violence and aggression. I would also say that I am a fiercely competitive individual, however, I think that most would describe me as a relatively calm, fair and softly spoken individual.  I find this somewhat hidden or unspoken behaviour and the rules surrounding it intriguing. There are platforms in which aggressive behaviour is permissible for women…but only to a certain extent. Then there’s the realm of female aggression and damaging competitive attitudes against other women and ourselves.

You both, at times, work with duration, pain and the body. Can you speak to us about why this is and who/what has influenced you artistically?

SJN: People have been asking me this question for 13 years, and honestly I’m still not sure how to answer it! I have worked with duration and endurance differently in every work I have ever made, so there is not a single answer.

There is an assumption that performance makers who work with pain or physical mortifications of any kind are in it for ultimately exhibitionistic reasons. That might be true for some artists, and you might be able to apply that reading to the work of others if your engagement is superficial.

I am actually profoundly disinterested, and actually quite annoyed, by the Spectacle of Pain. I am annoyed by the fetishism of endurance, too. The fact that I do something for 12 hours is not interesting in and of itself. I’ve worked longer and more grueling shifts in hospitality. Women have longer labours than that.

Likewise, sticking a few pins in myself is not challenging or interesting unto itself- I do much more physically hardcore things for fun, on my own time, and I don’t call it art. What is interesting is the artistic application of those practices. I think there is an assumption that if you are making body based work you are out for the shock value. This is such a boring, persistent and reductive reading. It’s a distinctly elitist, western discourse and a masculinist one at that; this voyeuristic display of physical dominance. It’s also deeply false, in my case at least. I couldn’t care less about shocking people – I am actually much more concerned with ushering an audience past the shock threshold so we can get on with the more interesting and intimate business of transmutation, dreaming, and magic.

Ultimately that’s what draws me to these practices. Repetition, duration, trance states- all of these things are tried and true pathways to the Ecstatic and that is what fascinates and drives me the most.

They are capable of opening doors into the numinous through which both performer and audience can enter. They are ways of dialoguing with the unseen, and a way that the bodies of strangers can speak deeply to each other, there are sublime openings and exchanges enabled in that space if you pilot it right. There is big healing to be found there. I made my first solo work in 2006, after several years of ensemble performance. I set out on solo practice with one objective in mind: I wanted the body of the audience, be that an individual body or a collective body, to be as strongly engaged and implicated in the work as the body of the performer. I wanted to create frameworks for co-manifestation of complex and volatile states. That remains the case today.

A lot of diverse interests have fed into this path: early in my practice I studied Butoh intensively, in Australia and Japan. I had been a self-harming teenager and a BDSM-practicing adult. I have been a practicing witch for as long as I can remember- I was steeped in both western occultism, mysticism as well as the deeply inscribed ancestral cultural patterning throughout my upbringing. I possess more than a passing fancy for techno and entheogens, and have been going to dance parties and raves since my late teens, and these spaces have and continue to teach me a great deal about collective transcendental ritual.

I am also an Aboriginal person who has been divested of a direct connection to my ancestral customs and rituals, or at the very least, the set ritual vocabularies which might have been passed to me by my mob had my family managed to maintain that continuity.

I am deeply driven by the need to give form to the conversation that is taking place continually in my body by other, more improvisational means. This kind of performance has been a way of giving voice to haunted flesh, to a roaring in the blood.  I am interested, also, in taking a de-colonial stake in a field of practice which has historically been overwhelmingly white and which has relied heavily on dubious pseudo-Shamanic posturing, unreconstructed primitivism. In some respects, it is an act of very deliberate de-colonial reclamation.

MW: At the moment I know that my body can handle endurance and pain and this is a strength within my practice. I know that there will be a time when endurance is no longer my strength and that the pain will be all too overpowering and damaging. This too may become an area of interest for my practice. I don’t know. I know it hurts more with every project, as I acquire a new injury related to age and relative disuse of certain muscles and joints in recent years. I think of it as a really honest language for an artist. There is no way of hiding emotion in an endurance event and there is no certain way of influencing, determining or predicting an outcome. In this way I find it both exciting and intimidating.

I am mostly influenced by local artists, whom I have come to meet and know through their practice. Artists I have recently been influenced by include: Mira Oosterweghel, who uses both her own body in performance, but also delegates performance to other artists; and theatremakers, THE RABBLE, whom I was very fortunate to spend 2016 with as Lead Artist Intern. Theatre for THE RABBLE is a conversation that sits somewhere between extreme pursuits of the body and mind, exquisite beauty, pain and comedic and political intelligence. Emma Valente of THE RABBLE has continued to act as mentor for my artistic practice into 2017, and is dramaturg for SQUASH!

Meg, you have participated in Adhocracy numerous times over the years, in different ways. Tell us about the Adhocracy experience from an artist’s point of view (participating artist and artist in the audience).

MW: In 2014 I took part in my first Adhocracy residency, Future Present, alongside 9 other SA artists under the guidance of Rosie Dennis of Urban Theatre Projects. At this point in time I was at a major crossroads in my career as a purely visual artist. I had become interested in interdisciplinary and collaborative art making, having only ever worked in solitude in a largely isolating manner. Exposure over a two-week period to the methods of artists largely unknown to me, allowed me to explore process and take risks in an environment where no idea was precious. I learnt how to make in a space where it was okay to be vulnerable, experimental and chuck things out when they’re just not working. It was during this residency that I first met and collaborated with performers and theatremakers, Ashton Malcolm and Josephine Were. Together, we continue to decipher and define a language of making that sits somewhere between live art, theatre and performative installation and have been prolifically generating works across all disciplines.

In 2016, I was able to take part in Adhocracy as part of a newly formed collective of artists: Hew Parham, Nick Bennett, Paulo Castro and Sascha Budimski, on Tension of Opposites. This was the first time all of the artists had worked together and the work was in its very initial stages of development. The platform of Adhocracy allowed us to test the viability of the team’s working relationship within a collaborative framework, and to devise material in a compressed (and somewhat intense) fashion. With access to multiple audiences and the ability to talk to the work and respond to critical feedback and discussion over the three days of presentation of the work in progress, was extremely beneficial to the team and the direction for the work leading into its next stage of development.

Adhocracy is also just a very excellent opportunity to observe and to chat. To see artists come from all over Australia to share their process, listen to early creative thoughts and engage in a national conversation, Waterside in Port Adelaide, is actually just a giant treat every year.

SJ, last time you were in Adelaide, you presented a new work Stone Tape Theory, as part of PADA’s Near & Far exhibition and the first Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. The work then went straight to SPILL in the UK. What is the experience of presenting your work in Australian and European contexts as a queer, Aboriginal artist?  

SJ: The short answer goes like this: I am a bi-cultural, globalised, neo-colonial, late capitalist, Indigenous Diaporic, queer subject, and unpacking what that means is a big part of my practice and life. Just to widen the context: I come from a background of geographical and cultural dispossession: I was raised by a single Aboriginal mother and we moved around a lot. Just as she had done, as the offspring of itinerant workers, and as they had done as people who were dispossessed of their land. So, spatial liminality is second nature to me. I’ve never called a singular place home and I doubt I ever will. I’ve been on the move pretty constantly between Australia and Europe for the duration of my adult life and practice. My practice has grown in the in-between space in geographical, discursive, formal and cultural terms. Thresholds and crossroads are my place in the world, everything I make is generated from within these spaces.

A work like Stone Tape Theory (STT) travels more easily between contexts because it is speaking quite broadly. First and foremost, it’s a work about mental health and my specific struggle with complex trauma. It’s not a work which has what audiences might see as recognisably Indigenous or queer themes, despite the fact that it is made by a Queer Indigenous artist and my subjectivity has entirely shaped its realisation.

Whether or not a work, made by an Aboriginal artist, which is not explicitly relating to their Aborginality, is still an “Aboriginal Artwork” is like enquiring after the sound of one hand clapping…it’s a question I hope we are all bored of, by now.

One of the tricky things, of course is, once an artist is identified as Aboriginal, they are not allowed to be or make anything else. Queer artists often fall prey to the same pigeonholing, but to a different, and I would argue, significantly lesser extent. Aboriginal artists who choose to (*gasp*) occasionally make work about other things are often treated by the art public and occasionally by their peers as somewhat treacherous or suspicious- it’s just further evidence of our failure to fulfil the criteria of a white-centric standard of Indigenous “authenticity”. This just a part of a bigger, and much more complex, structure of systemic exclusion which seeks to sequester Aboriginal practice away from the main body of contemporary art. It’s just another manifestation of a colonial imperative to keep Aboriginal people and artists firmly in our place. It was a bold choice for TARNANTHI and PADA to jointly present Stone Tape Theory in the context of a major review of Indigenous practice, because the dominant perceptions of what that can be remain quite narrow in Australia. Next Wave made a similarly bold choice by programming Concerto No. 3 in BlakWave.

I’m thankful to the presenters I have worked with in this country who have shown this kind of guts, and it does take guts.

I presented STT at SPILL London within weeks of the Adelaide presentation. It was the second time I had been commissioned by SPILL, the first was Bone Library in 2015. Bone Library had received a thunderous reception at the previous SPILL so the pressure felt very high. I made the work, as I make all my work, entirely on my own.

I had been without a fixed address for about 9 months prior to the presentation, I didn’t have a studio, and I was managing what can only be described as a fully blown nervous breakdown, I was really held together by frayed sticky tape at that point. So to say the work was pretty raw is an understatement.

It went down well in London, though I am sure it confused and polarised some people. It was not an easy work. It required some investment of risk and discomfort from the audience. Some people literally left screaming: even I was terrified to be in there sometimes, the force of energy summoned by the work was immense and occasionally tipped into actual horror.

I have a long history of presenting and working in the UK, in particular. It was really in England that I first established my practice, after I moved there in 2006. The live art community, and specifically the community in Bristol where I was based, had a big part to play in growing me up artistically. Much of my practice, especially with regards to the works which focus on the broader terrain of colonial history, have been born out of my own cultural and political bi-location between England and Australia. England still feels wildly foreign to me at times but then, so does Australia.

That said, adapting Bone Library for an overseas audience was a nerve wracking experience. First of all, there are protocols and relationships that I have to carefully observe and manage in order to take the work off-country. There were a lot of ethical questions which I had to very rigourously engage before the work was ready to tour. That took about 6 months of extra work.

I did not expect the work to receive the rapturous reception that it did at SPILL, or subsequently at Venice International Performance Art Week. It was a really humbling experience, because I saw how deeply audiences from literally all over the world (there were delegations from every continent at Venice) were able to connect with it.

The English really surprised me, to be honest. UK audiences are known for their coolness, and I also did not expect them to so readily connect with the work, and to do so with such depth and sincerity. People were bawling their eyes out, like really really crying, when I read the Elder’s welcome handed the bones into their care. Bone custodians from everywhere regularly write to me to express their gratitude for the work, for the insight that it gave them and the chance they had to connect with some sense of intimacy and agency to a history which has been denied. It’s not just Aboriginal people who are denied our truth when history is suppressed. Settlers are also denied the opportunity to reckon with their own part in that history and to heal their own relationship to it as the descendants of perpetrators. Similarly, the work has yielded incredible, heartful dialogues between me and others whose cultures have been marked by similar traumas. This is part of the cultural labour that I aim to achieve with Bone Library, and many of my other works.

I dearly wish I could say I had had the same experience performing the work in Australia. But sadly the work has only been performed to scale in this country once in its 7 year life span, for five days in Melbourne in 2010. Likewise, Unsettling Suite, the body of works that Bone Library comes from, has also only been seen once in this country, at Performance Space in 2013. Elders and Aboriginal community have expressed their appreciation of the work, as have quite a few emerging Aboriginal artists who have personally expressed to me how influential Bone Library and the other works of the Unsettling Suite have been on their own practices. This is hugely rewarding and sustaining for me to know. I had wonderful audiences for the 2010 performance and I know that and, that said, I’ll repeat that the work has been produced to scale once, in its 7 year life span.

In the 7 years I’ve been performing it, Bone Library has received a total of about 600 words in coverage from the Australian arts press, and a good 200 of those were expended by a critic fixating on my fashion choices, hairstyle and “air of contemporary urban sophistication” which apparently undermined her own expectations of what an Aboriginal person looks like…this is not me having sour grapes, by the way!

I also have a lot of really, deeply wonderful and nourishing support here, and owe a tremendous amount to the people who have backed my practice fiercely.  I’m just alluding, perhaps not so subtly, to some structural disadvantages that have affected me as an Indigenous queer experimental artist working in this country.

We also have a problem, in Australia, with devaluing our own artistic legacies. This is a very colonial problem. Institutionally, whole local performance histories have gone criminally under-recorded in favour of a focus on the European and American cannon. This shows up, for me and other artists, in peculiar ways. For instance, recently, I was made aware of a graduate show at a well-known art college in which a student had made a piece that directly plagiarised a work of mine. I’m not talking about an obscure piece, either, but a work which I have performed all over the world, at least once a year, for the last 12 years. If a student had made a piece that was, say, directly plagiarising the work of any of my European or American peers, I can’t imagine they would have gotten away with it. But “local” artists are fair game because we are fundamentally valued less. Art students know everything there is to know about Marina Abramovic but they’ve never heard of Jill Orr. And our cultural memory here is so alarmingly contracted.

People who are students now, even in cities with such rich local performance histories as Sydney, know everything about the 70’s in New York but nothing about the radical work that was being produced in the 90’s in their own town, by living artists who probably live around the corner from them. I find this confounding and deeply saddening.

All of these things have been very good reasons for me to put a lot of distance between myself and Australia, at times. Distance is also essential for me to gain perspective on the things that I want to talk about here, especially with regards to de-colonial discourse. It helps me to generate and clarify ideas. It’s hard to do that here, because the problems you want to address are inches from your face at all times.

Tell us about something you are currently obsessed with?

SJ: I’ve been too concerned with survival recently to have the time for many obsessions, sadly. Hopefully that will change. Other than that, I guess my thoughts are quite occupied by environmental calamity and existential collapse, and the looming specter of theocratic fascism.

Planting a medicinal herb garden while the world burns, basically.

I’m also trying to finish writing a couple of books. I’m heavily pre-occupied with re-grounding back in Australia after 9 years predominantly based in Europe – that is a shock to the system. I am obsessed by all the things that are fucked about Australia politically and continually strengthening my own agency and that of those around me to resist, agitate and transform this neo-liberal colonial white supremacist political cesspit we’re all trying to survive in. I’ve also been pretty obsessed with body-building and weightlifting for about a year now, lifting heavy shit keeps me sane.

MW: To be honest, I’m not great with obsessions. I don’t really have interesting ones. I do become engrossed with current projects and then ways of switching off from projects.

The problem is that my projects often require a huge change to my lifestyle in order to realise a project outcome. Right now, I would say that I’m obsessed with the game of squash and becoming quite good at it (I hope).

The counter obsession is watching mindless documentaries on Netflix such as Locked Up – a documentary that follows prisoners in penitentiaries in the U.S., but I always find a link between these mindless obsessions and the things I’m currently working on.

As independent artists what are the kinds of initiatives and programs that you want to see further support for in the future? What excites you in Australian arts?

SJN: Top of the wishlist? I would like to see independent artists become unionised, the same as any other industry. I would like to see an end, once and for all, to the cult of genius and the speculation economy. I would like to see more initiatives that increase the industrial organising power of artists and arts workers, because we are an extremely exploited workforce.

I would like to see more opportunities for artists to become politicised and organised around labour and class, because right now the arts is dominated by, and upholding, overwhelmingly bourgeois cultural values to our great collective detriment.

I would like to see more opportunities for rigorous training and development for younger artists, in particular, outside of institutional frameworks. I owe my own practice to the training and mentorship I received at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Sydney. The Impact Ensemble was an incredible and totally accessible program. I would love to see it returned to its former glory. I would love to see more initiatives like it. I would like to see them abundantly funded.

I would like to see more de-colonial pedagogy. I would like to see a decentralisation of power outside of major institutions. I would like to see more and more and more Indigenous led organisations and more Indigenous people in positions of power within the arts. I would like to see how this would change the landscape for the better. I would like to imagine a future where Indigenous artists and people are running our own show, and the real depth, complexity, diversity and strength of our contributions as innovators, artists and leaders was give then value it deserves.

MW: I have obviously greatly benefitted from my relationship with Vitalstatistix and programs such as Adhocracy that champion experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and the importance of diverse audiences for works in various stages of development. As a former co-director of an Artist Run Initiative (ARI), I also champion artists who create opportunities that bridge gaps for other artists.

I highly support initiatives that nurture artists in their early stages of practice and those that interrogate artistic processes. It’s okay to have a good cry or two during this process!

I defer to an earlier question about artistic community with regard to what excites me about Australian arts. I just think that within the independent scene there is an overwhelming amount of support between peers and it is these relationships that allow us to keep kicking goals (shameless sports reference) as artists struggling in a pretty grim environment right now, all the while managing to sustain important, relevant and exciting conversations surrounding topics of substance that continue to matter.